Saturday, 11 July 2015

El Greco’s Anamorphic Figures

Everybody knows one or two paintings by El Greco, with their
strangely tall and thin people, like a TV picture when someone hasn’t found out
how to set the aspect ratio properly.

El Greco — real name Domenikos Theotokopoulos — was, as his
nickname suggests, a Greek living in Spain.

Philosophers, art critics, neurologists, ophthalmologists,
all sorts of people who ought to know better have assumed that El Greco had
‘something wrong with his eyes’; more specifically, that he actually saw people (and presumably other things)
as taller or thinner than they ‘really’ (i.e. according to the rest of us)
were. Surprisingly few people are capable of thinking things through: one can
perhaps forgive the art critics, neurologists, and ophthalmologists, but not
surely the philosophers; the specialists in thinking.

Think about it. Suppose you were a painter, and you wanted
to paint an accurate —more or less photographically accurate — picture of the
scene before you. Surely you would paint so that, when you looked at your
picture, and then at the scene it represented, what you saw was much ‘the
same’: the picture, and the scene, would have the same proportions, and any
anamorphic distortion in your vision would be constant, whether you were looking
at the scene or the picture: it would be entirely irrelevant; the picture would
have the same proportions as the scene, assuming that you knew (as El Greco did
in Spades) how to paint. What’s more, anyone else looking at picture and scene
would see the same proportions. As I say, think about it: carefully and hard.

The fact, surprising to some, is, then, that anamorphic
distortion in a painter’s vision will have not the slightest effect on his
picture’s proportions.

Oh, and yes: he was a wonderful painter.

I couldn’t find the
title of this one, but it must surely be St Martin; the Roman Officer who cut
his cloak in half to clothe a beggar.